by Kate Gable
"You really don't think that his son could be innocent?"
"A girl was found in his apartment," I say. "His friend was shot and he's gone. If he's innocent, why isn't he here?”
Peter comes to the precinct less than an hour later. He must have drove like hell to get here, probably breaking as many speed limits on the way as he could.
He shows me his computer and the bank withdrawals.
It will take some time for the footage to actually be sent over, but after making a call to the security personnel at the bank, I'm welcome to come look at it right now.
I usually don't like to do this, but I decide to take Peter along with me just to speed things along. I'll be able to know if he recognizes his son and that will give us a good starting point to figure out if he was indeed in the area making the withdrawals.
The first bank moves swiftly.
The guard quickly shows us to the back office and pulls up the footage from the ATM. I have memorized what Nick looks like from a photo that Peter had shown me: beefy with thick jowls and a crew cut popular with the Marines, not entirely dissimilar from what my fellow police officers like to do with their hair.
Much to my surprise, the guy I see in the ATM recording is anything but that.
He's tall, skinny, and lanky. He's wearing a hat, but the camera angle points up rather than down, directly at his face.
He hardly looks a day over eighteen years old and probably weighs no more than a hundred and ten pounds, soaking wet.
"No, no, no, no," Peter says, pointing at the screen. "That's not him, that's not my son."
"That's the guy who used his card," the security guard says with a casual shrug, completely unbothered.
We watch the footage again and again, then make our way to the next ATM right outside a 7-Eleven.
It takes longer to retrieve this footage, and it requires us to wait around for some time for the guard to show up to access the recordings. In the meantime, I consume about two bags of pretzels.
“No, absolutely not!” Peter shakes his head, getting animated.
I lean closer and confirm that it’s the same guy who did the other withdrawal; only this time he's wearing sunglasses. The features of his face are very distinct: pointy nose, pointy cheekbones, and pointy chin. It's clearly him, but who is he?
"One possible explanation is that your son lost his card or threw it away and this kid picked it up and used it," I say.
"How would he know the pin code?” Peter asks.
"They'd have to be friends. He'd have to tell him."
"No, my son would never say that," Peter insists, shuffling his feet as he walks back and forth. "Ever since he was a teenager, he always kept that pin code close to his heart."
"He would never share it with anyone?"
"No. Besides, he had a lot of money in that bank account."
"What do you mean?" I ask. “Like savings?"
He nods.
"How much?" I ask. "Peter. You have to tell me. This is all relevant."
“He had $58,000 saved up from all three tours in the Middle East. I mean, he spent some of his money, yes, went to Vegas, partied a little, but that’s what he had left the last time he told me."
"What was he going to do?"
"He didn't know yet. Maybe USC or maybe buy a house, but he was saving it. He was a good boy. Since it's his bank card, there's no way he would've given his pin code to any friend, let alone this punk."
I nod.
We go to the last location, a small ATM attached to a wall wedged between a pizza shop and a hair salon.
We call the number on the screen and the people on the other end say that it's going to be a little bit before anyone can get back to us. I leave my number and stress the urgency of the situation.
Back at the precinct, I try to figure out what to do. I send Peter home despite the fact that he keeps insisting on sticking around and figuring this out with me.
I wonder if he thinks that I'm incompetent because I'm young or a woman. Maybe both.
On the other hand, he might just be a sad father desperate to find his son. The only thing I can do is promise him that I'll do my best and get to the bottom of this as quickly as possible.
I update Captain Medvil on what I've found so far and I quickly print out the pictures from the ATM footage to distribute to the patrol cops making the rounds in the area.
They're going to canvas the businesses and ask questions to find out the name of this kid.
If we're lucky, he doesn't live too far away and someone knows who he is. If we're unlucky, he's a stranger just passing through, which will make everything a lot more complicated.
6
It's hard to explain exactly how defeated I feel as I drive back to my home. My sister is not there and the darkness that descends seems to be scarier and more devoid of life with every passing moment.
After my father's death, I never wanted to go back there, but my mom had the opposite reaction.
She never wanted to leave.
She cleaned up their bedroom and tried to make it look like all the blood, the guts, and everything horrendous that had happened there didn’t. I wonder how other people who have lost loved ones and have seen the grotesqueness of the scenes feel about them.
The world is a dark place and when I became a detective, I wanted to right so many wrongs. As the years drag on, I realize why drinking is such a problem in my profession.
You can't make everything right. Even if you do get justice, even if you do find out who did it, the truth is all you have.
You don't get that person back.
To this day, my mother insists that what happened to my father was suicide. She thinks that he took his own life, but I know different.
Okay, not know for sure, but I think differently. My father was a drug dealer and a drug runner. I never found out the depths of everything that he was involved with. My mother hid it from me. She never talked about it. Now, I wonder why not.
I used to think it's because she closed her eyes to that part of him, that secret life. All of that darkness that he unleashed onto the world.
I can't help but wonder what happened to all of that money, the extent of what he did or how far he got up the chain of command.
Was there even a chain of command?
There had to be.
He wasn't just a low-level thug.
If he were, then he would have gotten caught much sooner.
But I don't think that his death has anything to do with my sister’s, if that's where you think this is going.
I let my mind wander as I drive up the narrow mountain road.
Even though the FBI is now involved in searching for her, the days keep passing and you don't have to be in law enforcement to know that her case is going to go cold soon.
They don't have much.
They don't have a body.
They don't have any forensic evidence.
They just have a bag of clothes that she wore and that's it.
Did she change? Did someone make her change? Why?
The days are short and the nights are long. During this part of the year, snow has been cleared up and pushed along the sides of the road. It's dirty and black now, missing all of the romance of a snowy mountain day.
There was a time in my life that I wanted to get a cabin in the woods on some acreage away from everyone else. I'm not a very social person. I'll go out to bars. I'll hang out with Sydney, but I can count my friends on a few fingers.
I'm more social online. It's easier that way. You don't have to respond in real time. You can do it when you have a moment, when you're feeling bored, or when you have some time to kill.
This is probably the way it always is or was for introverts. Hanging out with people exhausts us. Our energy gets drained and then we need that alone time to get it all back.
When I was growing up, being an introvert was called being shy. The last thing that someone who is introverted ever wants to hear is someone ca
lling them shy in front of strangers. It’s an announcement to the world that there's something wrong with you and that you're not like everyone else.
I don't want to give you the impression that I had a difficult childhood. Most of the time, I didn't.
Most of my memories are happy ones: playing in the backyard, going swimming in the lake, and skiing.
It was always in nature where I found myself to be the happiest. It was always in nature when the world seemed to make a little bit more sense.
Before driving all the way over to my mom's house, I pull over right in front of the big boulders on one side of the lake, get out, and go on a little walk.
Nature has always brought me peace. It has always put me at ease when nothing else could.
Working this job has taken me away from all that.
I work in the city and I deal with city problems. I'm always in my car and most of the time, that's not enough.
The pines surround me, long brooding ones that cast wide shadows all around. I climb up one of the boulders and just moving my legs in that way that isn't just walking on asphalt fills me with glee.
This is where I used to hang out a lot as a kid.
My dad would bring me here when I was five or six years old. We would climb these boulders and we wouldn't care that the people that own the houses right around here, the mega-mansions, would complain. Most of them were hardly ever home and that was just fine by us.
I was eighteen years old when Violet was born and the father and mother that she grew up with were drastically different from the ones that I had.
On one hand, they were more mature, but on the other, they were also more selfish. Sometimes you give your firstborn too much attention and other times you try to make up for all the mistakes that you made with your first one when you have your second.
That's what it was like for Violet. Sometimes she was allowed to do things that I wasn't and other times her life was so much more magical than my own.
Unfortunately, she never knew our dad, not really. He died when she was a toddler.
I wonder what kind of father he would be the second time around. I wonder what things he would have made up for and what he would have done better.
I sometimes think what kind of mother I would be had I become one when I was in my early twenties and what kind of mother I would be when I become one in my thirties.
I wasn't pregnant long and there was nothing I could do about the miscarriage, but in that span of a few weeks, when I was still in college, my whole life turned upside down.
Suddenly, I started living for the person I was going to be, as the mom who was going to be taking care of this baby. Nine months didn't seem like enough time to prepare, not at all, but that's all I had or so I thought.
It turned out that I had so much less. No one knows about my miscarriage. Maybe one day, if I'm ever close enough to someone to get married, I'll let them know. I'll share that part of me that is filled with secrets, but the problem is that I have so many other secrets as well.
The boulder that I sit on top of is smooth but hard to the touch. I dig my sneakers into it, but that's hardly necessary as there's so much friction already.
I breathe in and out slowly and deliberately. I need to go back to find out anything more that I can about my missing sister and to help my mom, but I can't bring myself to move.
Violet was always someone who laughed very easily and she cried easily, too. It was like she had this precipice of emotions. Sometimes she was angry, sometimes she was sad, and sometimes she was happy. Sometimes she was all of those things, all at once. I know that's what drove Mom nuts.
Mom is a librarian who likes rules and order. She organized my childhood books according to the Dewey Decimal System and she even made a small little card catalog of our home library.
In addition to working with books at work, she also had a big collection in our house. There was a whole separate bedroom devoted just to books.
When I saw Beauty and the Beast for the first time, I recognized myself in Belle, beautiful yet quiet and reserved, being held hostage by some mysterious stranger in a castle full of books.
Well, that was kind of a fantasy come true, especially for a twelve-year-old girl with an imagination that was a little too big for her britches.
I adjust my seat on the rocks just as one side of my butt cheek falls asleep. It's cool against my body, which feels nice.
7
I was an only child for so long that I've often felt like an only child, even after my sister came into existence.
Of course, I never forgot about her, nothing like that. It's more that she appeared when I was already a grownup. So, when I thought about my childhood, it was just me.
I don't want to give you the impression that I was lonely. I was anything but that.
My parents were very involved, always going to my events and always encouraging me to participate in things, even though I didn't really want to.
My mom was even more like that with Violet. She loved to write and take pictures and make videos, so she wanted her to participate in the newspaper and the photography club.
Violet did join last year, but what about this one? I can't quite remember now. It seems like parts of her are vanishing already.
When I was younger, I thought of her as my baby. There were already girls that I knew who had children and she was a baby that I spent a lot of time with, especially that first summer when she was born.
I came home to help take care of her and the days were filled with a lot of laughter, swinging, and naps. Being a mother is hard, probably at any age and I've never been one full-time, but that summer I really loved it. I loved mothering her. My mom worked full-time and took on extra shifts since Dad’s money either came in buckets or not at all.
My father was a drug dealer, but for many years he didn't provide much. I don't know the details of what happened, but money was hard to come by.
That's why I had so many loans when I graduated. That's why I'm still paying them off.
I climb down off the boulder and walk closer to the water. It moves slightly in the wind. It looks black now, illuminated by only a few lights somewhere in the distance.
I walk over to the public boat launch with a big gate out front that says that it's closed after dusk. I climb it and defy the rules, just like I did when I was a teenager.
When I was Violet's age, I had a friend who was so much more than a friend. We have known each other since we were in preschool.
His mom was an English teacher and she was good friends with my mom. We played a lot together. We were raised like we were brother and sister.
When we were twelve, something happened. I got feelings for him. I couldn't stop thinking about him. It was over the summer that we spent swimming in the lake and had taken his dad's boat out onto the water.
He was tan and muscular in that scrawny pre-teen way. He had poofy blonde hair and bright blue eyes and went by Nicky because he thought it made him sound cool.
He liked to draw on his arms using a ballpoint pen. They were thick elaborate designs to make it look like tattoos. I drew on my arms and legs, too, but my favorite was drawing on my white sneakers. I would color it all in and then go up to where the fabric was and doodle along there.
It drove our moms nuts. They vowed to never buy us new shoes again, but we would just laugh it off.
Nicky was a lot like Violet, quiet and reserved as strangers, but fun and outrageous with me and to those he knew well. The first time we kissed, we sat right here at the edge of this dock.
My left foot was in the water and my shoe sat on the dock next to me. We sat on the edge of this dock for a really long time, laughing, drinking Sprite, and eating green Jolly Ranchers until we were so high on sugar and our attraction to one another we could burst.
Just as the sun was setting, Nicky leaned over, closed his eyes, putting his hand on my arm to pull me close. He kissed me in a way that no one has ever kissed me before (or s
ince). He was asking me permission, but he was also telling me what he wanted.
He was nervous and uncertain, and so was I. That was okay because we had each other. I knew right there and then that he would be the person that I would spend the rest of my life with.
It was a certainty and very much unlike the feeling I get when I meet men now as an adult. They are just dates, boyfriends, somebody to have a good time with for an evening or two or maybe a week, a month, a year. With Nicky, the world made sense. He got me. He understood everything there was about me.
At least that was what I thought back then and that's something that twelve year olds will probably think for as long as there are twelve year olds in the world.
That's what's great about being that age. You're no longer a child, but you're not a teenager either. You're in this strange existence between worlds; purgatory, some would call it.
I force myself up to my feet. I can't stay here much longer staring into this dark lake, remembering everything that I ran away from here for. I don't know if my hometown is just a bad place or is just a bad place for me, but I had no idea that my life would be filled with so much death and sadness until that afternoon when I lost Nicky.
We were on the boat, like we were for the millionth time that summer. It was a small boat with a small outward motor. We both were good swimmers and the lake was warm. We sunbathed for a while, listened to music, talked trash, and joked around with our friends that came by around noon.
Neither of us was drunk because we never had anything stronger than root beer aboard; that was one of his father's rules. It was a cardinal sin to drink on a boat and though we broke some rules, we always abided by that one.